Sleep is very important and linked to your overall health. Recently, a research presented at ESC Congress 2018 says that middle-aged men who sleep five hours or less per night have twice the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases during the following 20 years than men who sleep seven to eight hours.
The researcher, Ms Moa Bengtsson who is from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, said: “For people with busy lives, sleeping may feel like a waste of time but our study suggests that short sleep could be linked with future cardiovascular disease.”
The research began with 798 participants and collected their medical records about major cardiovascular events for 21 years. Finally, the researchers excluded men with incomplete data on sleep duration, incomplete follow-up information, or who had cardiovascular disease before starting and left 759 men for the analysis.
They found that diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, current smoking, low physical activity, and poor sleep quality were more common in men who slept five or fewer hours per night compared to those who slept seven to eight hours.
Ms Bengtsson said: “Men with the shortest sleep duration at the age of 50 were twice as likely to have had a cardiovascular event by age 71 than those who slept a normal amount, even when other risk factors were taken into account.”
She continued: “In our study, the magnitude of increased cardiovascular risk associated with insufficient sleep is similar to that of smoking or having diabetes at age 50. This was an observational study so based on our findings we cannot conclude that short sleep causes cardiovascular disease or say definitively that sleeping more will reduce risk. However, the findings do suggest that sleep is important—and that should be a wake-up call to all of us.”
